Factoons. Brainwave. 13th June

Ever wondered why the process of recording on a disc is referred to as burning? The information on a disc is recorded in digital form, represented by a series of 1s and 0s. A disc has a thin reflective metal sheet with a translucent dye layered on top. The CD burner is equipped with a powerful 'write laser' that burns the translucent dye to make it opaque. The parts which are opaque block the light from reflecting off the metal sheet, giving it a digital value of 0, and the parts which are left translucent get a value of 1. This is how data is burnt on a CD!

Factoons. Brainwave. 6th june

A walnut is tough to crack but just because it's hard-shelled doesn't mean it's a nut. In reality, walnuts are classified as drupes! Fruits that have a fleshy covering over a hard shell surrounding the seed, are called drupes like coffee, mangoes and coconuts. Dry fruit that just have a hard shell covering a seed inside are true nuts, like hazelnuts, chestnuts and acorns.

Brainwave. Factoons. 30th May

Leeches are blood-sucking worms, whose mouths work as suction pumps to draw blood out without causing any pain to the host because of the anesthetic in their saliva. One of the easy ways to get rid of them is to put some salt on their body. The salt draws all the water from inside the leech's body leaving it dehydrated. Although, you shouldn't put salt on leeches when they are attached to your skin. It can make them vomit back into the wound which can become infected.

Brainwave. Factoons. 23rd May

A 'byte' is the unit to measure digital information, like hard drive memory, file size, etc. Before there were pen drives and CDs, we stored and transferred data using floppy disks (which had a humble capacity of 1.44mb). We sure have come a long way from there. In fact, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noticed in 1965 that the capacity of the circuits had been doubling every two years since it had been invented, he predicted that the same trend would continue in the future. It looks like Moore's Law holds true even today.

Factoons. Brainwave.16th May

Here's the new factoon for this Wednesday. 
In its basic form, rubber has few uses. But depending on what chemicals are added to it, we can make rubber flexible (like rubber bands) or strong (like tyres), and create several things with interesting properties.

Factoons. Brainwave. 9th May.

I have started doing a Science cartoon every Wednesday for the Brainwave facebook page. This one is about Carbon Dating. You can visit the facebook page here - Brainwave
Here's the description for this Factoon - Any living being gathers a fixed ratio of Carbon12 and Carbon14 during its lifetime. Once dead, it begins to lose the Carbon14 stored within its body while the Carbon12 amount stays the same. The difference in the ratio of Carbon12 and depleted Carbon14 helps scientists measure the fossil's age.